Escaped monkey was running from fight, says keeper

A search is continuing for a monkey in the Cairngorms, who may have been avoiding a fight during breeding season.

It escaped from an enclosure it shares with more than 30 other Japanese macaques at the Highland Wildlife Park on Sunday.

The alarm was raised when the monkey was spotted in gardens in the nearby village of Kincraig.

A team from the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS), which runs the park, has been trying to find and recapture the animal.

RZSS' Keith Gilchrist said: "It's a very dynamic group of animals with quite a strong hierarchy.

"This time of year is breeding season so tensions run a little bit high and some times fights break out over breeding rights.

"When that happens the animals' adrenaline can some times over-ride everything and rather than get into a fight it seems this one has just gone for it and got past the enclosure perimeter fence."

Mr Gilchrist said RZSS was concerned the situation had happened.

The society's search team has used a drone to help them try and find the monkey.

Keith Gilchrist, of RZSS, said the wildlife park's troop of Japanese macaques were a dynamic group

A drone has been used in the search effort

Japanese macaques, also known as snow monkeys, have been a long-established feature of the Highland Wildlife Park's collection.

The park had a troop of 37 monkeys, before one got out.

Kincraig resident Carl Nagle said he was having a "lazy Sunday morning" when he read on a local Facebook group that the village had an unusual visitor.

"I looked out the window and there he was, proud as punch, standing against the fence eating nuts that had fallen down from one of the bird feeders," he told BBC Scotland News.

"He hung out, he looked a bit shifty like he was where he wasn't supposed to be, which was true.

"He wandered around the garden a bit - we thought he'd gone but he came back and then he was up on the bird feeders trying to get into them. He was having a really good go - he worked harder at it than a squirrel."

Carl Nagle spotted the monkey on bird feeders in his garden

Members of the public have been urged not to approach it but to contact the zoological society with information.

Snow monkeys are native to Japan's islands and live in a range of habitats.

They appear in Buddhist stories and are represented in the Three Wise Monkeys maxim "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil".